Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic told the Security Council that international cooperation was needed to ensure that A.I. remains under human control.

© Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Democrats and Republicans in Congress opposed the creation of a commission with the power to veto federal research awards.

© David Goldman/Associated Press

Chris Wright also doubled down on his criticism of renewable energy sources like solar power.

© Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

As Xi Jinping visits President Trump in Washington, his country lags behind the United States on A.I. development in key areas — but Beijing has advantages elsewhere.

© Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

As Xi Jinping visits President Trump in Washington, his country lags behind the United States on A.I. development in key areas — but Beijing has advantages elsewhere.

© Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

Advances in artificial intelligence and the myriad ways content is shared online have made establishing authenticity even more difficult for users of social media.

© The New York Times

There is a unit inside the Justice Department whose only job is to prosecute corrupt public officials. It is called the Public Integrity Section. In January 2025 it had about thirty-six lawyers, and today it has two. When people ask why there are no indictments, no convictions and no special counsel, that is the answer. The people who would bring those cases were removed in the first year of the term. The referees left the field, and the game kept going.

Not exactly sure what the story is with The Leah Files on substack, though I would guess that this is the work of a team with resources, presented as the work of one person which raises questions like who's paying for this and why. Nevertheless I am sharing it because there's interesting information here. This section is, imo, the most important part of the summary, and I've saved it for arguing with strangers online: 3. Disabling the detectors Score at month twenty: 8.0 of 10 (8 on proven evidence). Weight: 15 points. This part of the record has the strongest evidence and the least public attention, and it is the part that determines the score. On January 24, 2025, seventeen inspectors general were dismissed in a single night without the thirty days' notice the statute requires. On September 24, 2025, Judge Ana Reyes held the dismissals unlawful, describing the violation as obvious, and declined to order any remedy, on the reasoning that the president could dismiss them again with proper notice. In February 2025 the director of the Office of Government Ethics, confirmed two months earlier to a five-year term, was removed, and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs was installed as acting head of both that office and the Office of Special Counsel, the sole enforcer of the Hatch Act. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which brings pardon-for-pay and foreign bribery cases, was reduced from about thirty-six attorneys to two, and its open cases fell from roughly 190 to about twenty. The FBI's internal audit office and its public corruption squad were dissolved. Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was paused by executive order. The beneficial-ownership registry that would have identified the owners of anonymous shell companies was narrowed so that 99 percent of covered entities no longer report, and this August the database itself was ordered deleted. The Government Accountability Office found six violations of the Impoundment Control Act in 2025, and in September of that year the budget office cut off funding to the council of inspectors general, taking fifteen oversight websites and their whistleblower hotlines offline. This is why the bribery criterion is scored five on proven evidence when the reported pattern would support an eight. The people whose job it is to prove bribery have been removed. When the detectors are off, the absence of convictions carries almost no information, and the question "where are the indictments" describes the mechanism rather than refuting it. This is the Abacha model of governance. The most important figure in this article is not a dollar amount. It is the reduction of the Public Integrity Section from thirty-six lawyers to two.

Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would place grants under review by an outside panel, the latest effort to redirect billions of dollars in research spending.

© Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

Maintenance projects have been put off around the country and resources diverted to the president’s favored projects in Washington.

© Erin Schaff/The New York Times

An internal memo reinterprets the law so that only the intentional killing of animals, not collateral harm, is illegal.

© Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press, photographed under NOAA permit # 21371

At an event in Washington, partisanship took a back seat as elected officials, religious leaders, parents and artists called for reining in artificial intelligence.

© Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

The landmark legislation, known as the Clarity Act, stalled in the Senate as Democrats raised concerns about President Trump’s personal investments in crypto.

© Alex Kent/The New York Times

Federal prosecutors said proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil flowed through Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to finance terrorism.

Mr. Trump called Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, while Mr. Huang was onstage in Los Angeles and criticized calls to slow down and regulate A.I.

Some interesting developments in the AI world. Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO of AI company Anthropic, called for AI research to slow down a bit and for the application of more safety measures. Several other AI CEOs signaled agreement, including Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (Grok), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft).

Behind this development are others, notably the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack (previously) and a July statement signed by 1386 AI workers. Calls for reining in AI have come from a variety of sources over the past week, including the author of a book on NVidia and former president Obama. A British member of Parliament introduced an Artificial Superintelligence Bill "to prohibit the development, deployment and operation of artificial superintelligence systems; to establish monitoring and control powers in respect of such systems; and for connected purposes." King Charles III is scheduled to meet AI leaders. In the US Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have said they plan to introduce a Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. A bipartisan group of Representatives posted the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting (FRONTIER) Act. But that body seems unlikely to act, given president Trump's pro-AI attitude and recent comments by House Speaker Johnson. There are opposing views. Historian Rick Perlstein points out the long record of companies asking to be regulated in order to contain competitors. Timnit Gebru thinks "[t]his machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us." On the China side, a Foreign Ministry criticized the slowdown call as fear-mongering. The Minister of State Security sees AI as a security threat. American economist Noah Smith called for hacking Chinese systems to make a point.

The debate over the safety of artificial intelligence grew personal as key tech leaders said calls for government regulation were self-serving and misplaced.

© Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

The 64-year-old Michigan power plant was set to retire. Then the Trump administration intervened in a way that overstepped its authority, a court ruled.

© Julián Trejo Bax/Associated Press

Five years after virtually every world leader agreed to “phase down” the burning of coal for climate reasons, the fuel is more widely used than ever.

© Ahmad Mulia Panjaitan/Associated Press

Two lawsuits seek to reverse the Trump administration’s moves to open the habitats of imperiled wildlife to commercial activities.

© Kevin Schafer/Alamy

The state is considering extending the life of its last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, and allowing construction of new reactors to help meet its clean energy goals.

No company in the United States has ever restarted a reactor that was seemingly closed for good, but there are now three major efforts underway to do so.

© Nick Rohlman/The Gazette, via Associated Press

As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

The department argued in a court filing that OpenAI legally used articles by The New York Times to develop A.I., adding that national security depended on American tech dominance.

© Lexi Parra/The New York Times

The outdoor apparel maker joined environmental and Native American groups in challenging President Trump’s reduction of Bears Ears National Monument.

© George Frey/Getty Images

Navigation companies face a new dilemma after President Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America.

© Keito Newman/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

The government retaliated against the A.I. start-up “for constitutionally protected expressive activities,” a federal judge in California wrote.

© Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A legal dispute over the future of Kalshi, Polymarket and others has drawn in the Trump administration, the president’s son and nearly every state attorney general.

© Ricardo Tomás

The United States threatened sanctions for any country or entity that engages with Iran’s gold, digital assets, aviation, shipping and tech industries. Here’s why that matters.

© Vahid Salemi/Associated Press

For Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business.

© Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

The Justice Department resolved a lawsuit that accused the social media company of illegally gathering children’s information.

© Anna Barclay/Getty Images